This week is the last of the year 2022, and oh how time has flown. We started out this year announcing a new “premium” project which was later launched as Indigo (our membership program), brought more focus to our podcasts and creator members on Discord, got our merch back in stock, and much more. Here’s a look at some of the highlights that happened at Gensokyo Radio in 2022:
- Announced and launched Indigo
- Designed a new postcard since before the pandemic
- Rebranded our “Discord Stage Events” recordings to “Gensokyo Radio Meetup” podcasts
- Widened our podcast audience
- Started working with a new merch provider to get shirts back in stock
- Added over 2,300 new songs to the station
- Fought account and connection spam
- Began selling hoodies and women’s T-shirts
- Brought more musicians and guests on during Gensokyo Radio Live broadcasts
- Resumed publishing music reviews and improved news/review visibility
- Deployed a multi-regional server network for radio listeners
- Added more track information for most albums
- Announced as featured guests at TouhouFest 2023
- Improved the station’s scheduling system
- Held several request block events on Gensokyo Radio via Discord
- Shifted community focus to better include creator involvement and collaboration
- Deployed a new storefront website
- Became publicly listed on Icecast
- Began working with several additional artists to help publish their works
All of the above are things we’ve written about in greater detail throughout this year. If you’ve missed out on any of these as they happened, we encourage you to sign up for forum notifications, grab the Knowledge role on our Discord server, and get involved so you don’t miss out on future updates.
Speaking of the future, we already highlighted last week our plans to get going on web app development, bring additional albums into our store, and more, but I wanted to take a moment to step back, look at the bigger picture, and take note of some new focuses we’ve been hinting at for the past several months.
…
During this year, I’ve realized how close I am to completing my academic program and re-launching my life. Since getting laid off in 2017, I’ve been trying to answer the question that kids are often asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I went back to school hoping that I could earn something tangible and worthwhile, whether that was experience, filling in the holes in my knowledge, or something else, but during this time I also hoped I’d be able to answer that question. This year, I think I’m closer to finding it.
I spoke in 2015 about working full-time on Gensokyo Radio, spun up a Patreon campaign, and hoped that the rest would fill itself in if I just worked hard to appeal to the most people I could in this niche space. That may have been attainable with a much larger audience, but in 7 years, it’s not been so easy. Plus, while the work may have been very involved and time-consuming, I realized after having worked at my former job that I wanted to find work that was fulfilling. To me, feeling a sense of fulfillment in my work is incredibly important, especially if I’m going to do that thing 40 hours a week.
This year when we shifted our focus to helping creators, I realized that not only was there a path to providing value for everyone involved (artists, listeners, publishers, and distributors), but I felt a great sense of… promise? Possibility? There’s something in helping independent artists—truly helping them achieve what they might not be able to on their own—that is fulfilling. Whether it’s simple promotion, making physical albums for budding artists, or signal boosting their work through our niche platform, for what it’s worth, I want to do this. I feel like I must.
So perhaps this is the way forward I’ve been looking for over the past several years – or maybe not. But I won’t know until I try, and I’m already making progress. I hope you’ll join me in supporting the artists we’ve all come to know and love listening to and hearing from. Thanks for your continued support this year, and I hope I can count on you in 2023 as well. As always, thanks for listening!
[Knowledge #97]